Part 1 of an exquisitely detailed biography of Billy Midwinter by Pradip Dhole. The travelling cricketer played four Test matches for England, sandwiched between eight Tests Australia and holds a unique place in cricket history as the only cricketer to have played for both Australia and England in Test Matches against each other
“The most chameleon-like Anglo-Australian cricketer was Gloucestershire-born William Evans (‘Billy’) Midwinter, the only man to play for England against Australia and Australia against England. He was also the first man to play professional cricket regularly in both the northern and the southern summers, with Gloucestershire and Victoria respectively.”
- Geoffrey Partington in his book The Australian Nation.
At the very outset, the chronicler would like to convey his gratitude and indebtedness to Mr. Grahame Parker, erstwhile Secretary of the Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, and author of the article The Midwinter File, appearing in Wisden of 1971 for much of the biographical material pertaining to the Anglo-Australian cricketer William Evans Midwinter, and used in this narrative.
The environs seem to be steeped in elements of history, the British Royalty, and adventure. According to a brochure of the Forest of Dean Tourist Information and Travel Guide, The Royal Forest of Dean, often referred to as the “Queen of Forests,” covers about “204 square miles in the western part of Gloucestershire. The 20 million trees that cover the Royal Forest of Dean include oak, beech, ash, birch and holly trees. People who live in and around the Forest are known as Foresters. The area’s name is derived from one of the primeval forests of England. In 1939 the woodland area became the first park in England to be designated as a National Forest, one of the remaining Royal Forests in England.
“The Forest of Dean was originally designated by the Saxons for hunting. They were the first people to realise its potential. Thereafter, it became the hunting reserve of Kings for many hundreds of years to follow. Many of the Dean’s ancient rights and privileges come from its unique heritage as a Royal Hunting Forest. The Norman kings loved to hunt deer and wild boar and they introduced Forest Law and officials called Verderers, who were charged with looking after the animals and the woods they lived in.”
An article, attributed to AP Baggs and AR Jurica, entitled “St. Briavels”, in “A History of the County of Gloucester: Volume 5, Bledisloe Hundred, St. Briavels Hundred, the Forest of Dean,” and available on an archive known as British History Online, presents for general information the fact that the village, nestling in the valley of the River Wye, used to be known as far back as the year 1130 as St. Briavels (pronounced: brevels), the name thought to derive from that of the Celtic saint, St. Brieuc. The village of St. Briavels, a part of Gloucestershire, in South West England, forms the cradle of this story.
Past Parish records indicate that one William John Midwinter, farm bailiff, residing at Clay Lane End, about 1 mile away from Coleford, and known to have an active interest in cricket, had wooed Rebecca Evans, daughter of a farmer from the Lower Meend, St. Briavels, named William Evans, and had married her at St. Paul’s Church, Parkend, a small village at the heart of the Forest of Dean, on 13 Oct/1849, the ceremony being solemnised by the Rev Henry Poole.
The groom, William John, appears to have himself been born at the village of Chedworth, about 7 miles away from Cirencester, a market town in East Gloucestershire, and about 50 miles to the East of the Forest of Dean. The bride Rebecca is reported to have been born at St. Briavels, a medium-sized village and civil Parish of the Forest of Dean, near the England-Wales border. In short, both partners had unimpeachable and solid old Gloucestershire heritage, a fact that would assume considerable weightage at a later stage of this chronicle.
Although they were completely unaware of it at the time, a series of stirring events unfolding almost diametrically opposite the globe from the inception of the 1850s onwards, were destined to have a profound influence on the family of Willian John Midwinter, with their roots so deeply ingrained in the essential ethos of Victorian Gloucestershire.
The scene now shifts to the British colony of New South Wales in Australia, a very significant date being 12 Feb/1851. A discovery made by one Edward Hammond Hargraves, an experienced and successful prospector from the Californian Gold Rush at Sacramento Valley beginning in 1848, was about to spark off an upheaval in the economic status of the Australian colonies of New South Wales and nearby Victoria.
Speaking of this Edward Hargraves, The Cornwall Chronicle (Launceston) reported in their issue of 25 Jun/1851: “On his return to Sydney, he determined to make a tour of inspection. He started in the middle of last January, and travelled over a district extending to upwards of three hundred miles in length. On the 12th February, he first dismounted and dug for gold, and was successful in finding some dust. In numerous other places where the geological appearances seemed favourable, he also searched, and in no instance did he fail to find the precious metal. At a particular spot, which he named Ophir, he perceived the best indications of an abundant yield, and at once organised a company of nine persons to dig there…”
It was later determined that Hargraves’ discovery had been made “to the westward of Bathurst, which is 113 miles to the west of Sydney. The Ophir diggings are about thirty-five miles north-west of Bathurst, on the Summerhill Creek, near its junction with the Macquarie River…” Hargraves’ unearthing of the noble metal was to set off what is known in history as the Australian Gold Rush of 1851, with more deposits being discovered in some parts of the neighbouring colony of Victoria. Hopeful prospectors began to swarm to Australia from all parts of the globe as word of the discovery of gold began to spread. Ships plying between Australia and The Continent and even the Orient were soon packed with eager fortune-seekers, many in their youth, along with their families and their implements, each bosom fired with hopes of becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
The present story begins about 4 months later, on Thursday, 19 Jun/1851, with the birth of the first child in the family of William John Midwinter, about 30 years old by the time, and his wife, Rebecca, at Lower Meend, in the village of St. Briavels, near the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. Two more children were to follow: a daughter, subsequently named Jane, about 2 years later, and another son, John, 2 years younger than Jane. The first-born of the family was christened William Evans, the Evans being his mother’s maiden name, following a popular custom of the times, but he was known to one and all as “Billy”.
Alluding to William John Midwinter and his wandering spirit, Grahame Parker says: “Perhaps there was an itinerant streak in this father that was later to be strongly exhibited by the son, for there is no reference to William John Midwinter in the Forest censuses of 1841, 1851 and 1861.” Hearing accounts of the increasing prosperity of the Antipodean colonies in general and Victoria in particular, and not being entirely satisfied by his current status as gamekeeper in England, William John Midwinter, about 38 years of age by now, and therefore, no longer in the first flush of youth, decided to try his luck in Australia, the land of endless opportunities for an enterprising man.
A brochure of Penobscot History Online, under the title Penobscot Marine Museum Education, reveals some details of a ship that was to play a prominent role in our narrative at this juncture. From all accounts, the fast clipper class ship was constructed at Rockland, in the north-eastern American state of Maine, and was launched in 1853. The vessel was named after the great Seneca orator and leader among the North American indigenous population known as Sagoyewatha (“he who keeps them awake”), who had aided the British during the American Civil War, and who had subsequently come to be known as Red Jacket (the allusion doubtlessly pertaining to the military uniform of the British army of the times). A relatively fast vessel, she is reputed to have made the passage from Liverpool to Melbourne in 84 days in early 1860.
The Red Jacket, a clipper of 2,035 tons, painted by Percy Sanborn
Deeming the above vessel to be worthy of being their carrier for their proposed Australian adventure, the family of William John Midwinter set sail from Liverpool on 2 Feb/1861. The disembarkation passenger manifest for the incoming vessel Red Jacket at Melbourne on 24 Apr/1861 shows the following names as having arrived from England: Midwinter, William (age 38 years), Midwinter, Rebecca (age 36 years), Midwinter, William (age 9 years), Midwinter, James (age 7 years), and Midwinter, John (age 5 years).
It is immediately obvious that the data presented by Grahame Parker and that seen from the passenger list of the Red Jacket on her arrival at Melbourne on 24 Apr/1861 seem to be at variance with respect to the identity of the second child of the Midwinter family, Parker claiming a girl child named Jane and the ship’s list showing another son named James. Later events would establish the presence of a daughter in the Midwinter family beyond any doubt. Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is that the Midwinter family, comprising the father, the mother, and their three children are seen to have arrived at Melbourne on 24 Apr/1861 looking for a new life.
The book entitled The History of Bendigo, written by a journalist named George Mackay, and published from Melbourne in 1896, gives a wonderful insight into the affairs of this part of the goldfields area of Victoria during the early 1850s: “It has been settled beyond doubt that gold was first discovered (at) Bendigo at a place known in 1851 as ‘The Rocks,’ at Golden Square…. By this time the news of the earlier discoveries at Ballarat and Forest Creek had reached Great Britain, and before many months elapsed, thousands of the sons of the old land, and of the population of the neighbouring colonies were flocking to Victoria. The population of the colony rapidly increased from 97,000 in 1851 to 168,000 in 1852, 222,000 in 1853, and 364,000 in 1855… The valley of Bendigo was changed as if by magic, and after the winter of 1852 almost all of natural beauty that Bendigo had possessed had disappeared, and ‘Ichabod’ had been written on its sadly mutilated face….”
The history of the family in the period immediately after setting foot in Australia is not very well documented, but it appears that the senior William Midwinter’s aspirations of acquiring untold wealth at the Victorian gold-diggings were to remain unfulfilled. Instead, having tried his hand at being a gold miner, not very successfully, it may be added, he chose a more conventional and mundane calling as a butcher at a place known variously as Bendigo, the name coming from the nearby Bendigo Creek, and as Sandhurst, in the goldfield area of the Bendigo District of Victoria. It seems that the area had come to be known as Sandhurst in 1854, borrowing the name from the renowned Military Academy of England from which several of the later English settlers in the area had been trained. The confusion between the names of the same place leads us to an interesting historical fact.
In a brochure derived from the State Library of Victoria, there is a clipping from Page 2 of The Bendigo Advertiser of Monday, 27 Apr 1891 that speaks of an opinion poll being carried out as to whether the area was to remain named as Sandhurst or whether they should revert back to the old name of Bendigo, under the heading:
“BENDIGO OR SANDHURST
Tomorrow a poll will be taken in order to
ascertain whether the ratepayers of Sandhurst
are desirous of adopting the old name
of Bendigo, or of adhering to the name of
Sandhurst, which the city at present bears.”
The plebiscite, for which every adult inhabitant is reported to have cast his or her valuable vote, returned results of 1515 ‘yea’s in support of Bendigo and only 267 ‘nay’s. Consequently, the name of the area reverted back to Bendigo in 1891. The newly arrived Midwinter family made their first home in a small wooden dwelling with a floor of stone slabs, adjoining a stretch of open ground, and separated by a stone wall. Their new dwelling was at California Gully, in the Bendigo goldfields district, and about 100 miles away from Melbourne. Billy Midwinter soon acquired the childhood name of “Bendigo/Sandhurst Infant”. At various times, Billy Midwinter was also to be known as “Mid” or “Middy.”
(To be Contd…)